Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin
Thanksgiving is just a few days away, and I’m sure we’re all very busy, so let’s just get to the point.
First off, let it be known that I love my family very much. And I love my wife’s family too. That being said, last year, Thanksgiving at my house consisted of me, my wife, my two sons, and my brother. No other family members were there. It was glorious. Again, let me reemphasize that I love my whole family with all of my heart, but last Thanksgiving was probably the most [more]

My very dear, fellow Joupers:The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days – perhaps tonight. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when Thanksgiving should be no more. Tis hard to see the mighty prancing of reindeer, trampling the turkeys and pilgrim hats beneath their merciless feet. No cranberry or pumpkin to administer relief in that hour the most sad in the history of holiday cheer. O the holiday cheer. O the horrors premature twinkling lights and Black Friday sales. Truly it may be considered the most cruel and awful scourge which can befall the period between Halloween and Christmas. Heaven grant there may be an end soon.If I love quietness and rest of a tryptophan and carbohydrate-induced slumber, the Salvation Army bell ringers and crumple [more]

I was 5 years old and this was how I met Stan Lee. This was also how I met Spider-Man, but that’s pretty much synonymous, isn’t it? That’s the thing that was beautiful about Stan – born Stanley Marin Lieber – he was a living comic book character in his own right, way before billion dollar grossing films existed that you could practically see at the theater, every month of the year. You read X-Men for the first time and you knew he was there; you read the Hulk for the first time, he’s there, omnipresent like Galactus or The Watcher. I heard this monologue, and even though I had never even seen his image, I knew how large of a figure he was, or that being a comic fan could turn into a very large part of my life. [more]

Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Romneydale” by Weyes Blood
In some form or another, I’ve been living in my head for as long as I can remember. Sure, I join the real world from time to time, meet people, make friends, get married, have kids, and occasionally experience the kind of existential dread that only living in a crumbling society or dying world can evoke, but eventually I return to the daydreams. I’m always back in the fog. It’s like staring at a blank canvas, contemplating the paint, the strokes and layers forming in the ether before creating an image, or looking at [more]

This article is dedicated to former Deerhunter bassist Joshua Fauver, who tragically passed away this past Sunday. Thank you for helping to shape a sound that shaped my music tastes as a whole.
Dreary, gauzy, washed in reverb, and as jangly as jangle pop can get, this is the sound of an indie band hitting it’s stride; becoming a household name for the genre, and proving themselves to be one of the most vital and beckoning forces in indie rock. This is the sound of Deerhunter’s Microcastle, the band’s third album and a record that just celebrated its 10th birthday this past August. In that time this record has inspired a slew of artists in the genre. Microcastle was a gateway for a lot of people to Deerhunter, and for good reason. It’s a lean 12 tracks that sonically wouldn’t have been out of place coming out in [more]

Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Fire Woman” by The Cult
There are so many bands and artists out there that I will never get the chance to see perform live due to death or circumstance or whatever. I’ve made my peace with that, but there are an equal amount of bands and artists out there right now that, for whatever reason, I just haven’t seen perform either. And it’s a damn shame that one of those bands is The Cult.
Starting in England in the early ‘80s as kind of a post-punk-goth-rock thing under such monikers as Southern Death Cult or just Death Cult, [more]

The Cabaret Metro in Wrigleyville neighborhood of Chicago (well known as just the Metro now) has hosted a great number of stellar acts since 1982. Some of which I have witnessed, and most of them were with our group “The Fish Guys.” Brown and Crosse and Sonny frequented multiple times with me to see a number of acts like Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, The Jesus Lizard and The Reverend Horton Heat. The Metro holds about 1100 people. So it’s a larger venue in the city but by no means as massive as say the Aragon Ballroom. And it can get loud…really loud. I remember that from JSBX show…just piercing but somehow cathartic.
That was not the case this past Wednesday when the four of us took in the reincarnation of the MC5 headed [more]

As much as labels on art frustrate me they do indeed serve a purpose. One could say that a band sounds like melting plastic and I would know exactly what it means but to most folks it is not specific enough. Bands from the 1980s have labels like Synth, New Wave, Post Punk and Neo something or another and such labels never much appealed to me as a young Midwestern boy. The stuff that I grew up knowing as New Wave usually squeaked from my sister’s pink Panasonic jam box. My sister, three years my elder was into bands like Depeche Mode, NewOrder and Duran Duran. My bedroom was adjacent to hers but my sound system was much louder and I was usually blasting The Stones, AC/DC or Led Zeppelin. I was a rock- head and to me if it [more]

Have you ever had one of those songs that gets stuck in your head for days…weeks…years? Sure you have. These are the songs that always make the cut. The songs on repeat. We all have them. I have a ton. Welcome back to Endless Loop.
“Piume Di Cristallo” by Ennio Morricone
I’m going to be out of the office next week, right during my most favorite time of the year, and so it seems like today is the day for a Halloween-themed entry into the annals of songs I ceaselessly entertain myself with. Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, the combination of autumn weather, horror movies, ghosts and ghouls, pumpkin ales, and adolescent debauchery being things I would take in full time if it were so possible. And I used to pride myself on my costume effort before the boys came along [more]